Horsham 4 : Start to the season

We started with an away match against the one Sussex Uni team and were wondering which of their previous two teams' worth of members would turn up. It was a mixed bag as it turned out. On board 1, Julie scored a fantastic draw against a player graded 70 points higher than her. Meanwhile, the next three of our team regulars all managed to shed material unnecessarily and lose against slightly weaker opposition. Our new member, Guy Turvey, played a solid game to achieve a deserved victory on board 5, giving the final result some respectability for our team (1.5 - 3.5).

Five of us made the long journey to Hastings with no great hope of success, having seen their team's gradings. We started with 0.5 from 2 as Guy made a quick exit and yours truly played a strategic game where my opponent was manoeuvred into accepting a draw after I managed to double my rooks on the f-file. Julie accepted half a point soon after. There then ensued two titanic battles under the new time controls, lasting till well after 10:45, with over 65 moves each. Richard had a clear win in a rook and pawn ending, but his partner took about half an hour to concede it. Bob Lanzer played a very well calculated ending to extract a win from knight and three pawns against bishop and three pawns. This gave a very pleasing overall result of 3-2 to Horsham 4.